Spiderweb Software's Avernum series and other games

harvest

I was looking around for oldschool RPGs to play because I'm kind of tired of how actiony the current crop of stuff is. I just finished putting 63 hours on a New Vegas run, so that's a big reason why. Suddenly, I remembered Spiderweb Software's Avernum (Exile) games.

I remember playing the demo of Exlie 2 back in about 96 or 97 and being really enthralled with the setting and the character progression. Not so much the graphics, but I am a big fan of the SSI Gold Box games so that doesn't really bother me. Anyway I must have put 20 or 25 hours into that demo and didn't reach the end of it. Of course, back then, I was a teenager without a job or credit card to buy the complete version. Now, 15 years later, I think I might want to remedy that.

I've already started on the first game (demo again) and my guys are pretty low level still. I'm impressed by the scope of the story so far, and the size of the over (under lol) world map. Encounters are usually challenging and only one was outright unwinnable.

What are peoples' experiences with the Avernum games like? (Please mark your spoilers.) Does the story flow well from game to game? Does your save export from the first to the last?

Also tell me about the Geneforge games and their new one, Avadon, if anyone's played it.

Lets be big RPG nerds in here.

Panda4You

Hoooooly shit I put down (what felt like) half a lifetime into the first demo of Exile1, on my mom's shitty macintosh, when I was ~13.
That badboy required 2 goddamn megs of RAM so I had to use RAMdoubler to even start it up... Excellent, and frankly very accessible, SSI-style series. All three are wonderful if heavily dated.

#1 also had a brilliant shareware setup btw. You had the full game for free; it just that a giant chasm ran split through the middle of the world so you only had access to 50% of the areas, as well as couldn't ontinue quests/storylines that required you to pass this chasm. I'd like to think that I completed everything you could do in the shareware version

Made that punkass demon in the mage academy tower my bitch...

...after like 3 hours of save/loading.

Edit:

harvest wrote: »

Does the story flow well from game to game? Does your save export from the first to the last?

Like a motherfucker, I luurved the mainstories, zillions of little sidequests and recurring elements from earlier installations in the series you could discover throughout the trilogy. Iirc you can export saves but I dunno if #1 has access to all the character options later introduced, like gitzherikai or whatever they were called (how do I even almost remember that...), so there's that. Otoh #1 back in the day had this Sierra adventure style dialogue interface, so the games as a whole have probably been heavily updated since then.

CygnusZ

I actually played through the whole campaign of Avernum like, ten years ago. I wasn't really impressed with the story, but I had a lot of fun exploring the towns/dungeons and munchkining up my characters.

Skulkraken

The Exile series really impressed me when I was a kid. Even more so when I found out that it was made by like one or two people. Never got around to buying it.

Blades of Exile, which is basically a scenario designer/player designed around the Exile setting, was released as open-source a while back. Even better, the newer fan-modified builds are apparently compatible with 64-bit systems. (The original Exile games were 16-bit, so they have trouble running on newer machines.)

Personally, I like the Exile series more than the Avernum remakes, but that might just be my nostalgia talking.